Metro Is Out Of The "Confusion" Period.

"If we do not have 100% feasible assurance, we will not do so easily."

In May 19th, Tao Yuan, general manager of e-commerce division of Metro China, said at a press conference.

He refers to Metro's latest upgraded e-commerce platform, a shopping website metromall.cn and a App called "patrolling".

"100% workable grasp" reveals the special conservatism and prudence of German enterprises.

Maybe this can explain why WAL-MART opened more than 400 stores in China, Carrefour also opened to more than 200, and Metro has only 80 stores so far.

At present, Metro has more than 750 self-service wholesale stores in 26 countries around the world.

Although these 3 foreign retail brands have different business models, they all entered the Chinese market in the middle of 1990s.

The speech has been the third time since Jeroen de Groot took office in the Chinese District in November 2013, explaining the latest strategic layout of Metro to the media in the small auditorium of the Jin Jiang Hotel in Shanghai.

Jin Jiang Hotel is one of Metro's business customers.

In the past year, Metro has seen some positive changes since April 2014.

Xi Long has made a great reform in the original management structure of metro, announcing the focus of future development on the five major businesses: e-commerce, business support, Fuli products, food distribution, wholesale and shopping mall.

In fact, Fuli products and spot purchase are the business models established by Metro from 1996 to the Chinese market.

Since its inception in 1964, "ready to buy" is the core feature of the German retail companies. The company's full name is "Metro Metro Cash &Carry".

The Metro Group is also involved in hypermarkets, department stores and consumer electronics stores, but the share of spot purchase and self pportation accounts for nearly half of the total.

He has been working in Metro for more than 20 years, but his official resume has been highlighted: he has successfully achieved a business reversal in the Russian and Poland markets.

Prior to that, he was Metro's self purchase global COO. His duties included receiving reports on operational affairs in China and understanding Asian culture.

Before this round of reform, Metro's business line also includes bulk purchase, catering, factory and customer sales.

The corresponding business objective is "to be an expert in the whole field".

Uwe Hoelzer, the former president of China, has repeatedly stressed one thing inside Metro: "don't try to educate your customers." He Zhewei

He Zhewei has made a lot of efforts to meet all the needs of all customers and potential customers, such as "many discussions" to take the German management and board of directors, so that they agree that Metro, which used to engage in self-service wholesale business in the past, has launched the delivery business in China, allowing companies that only receive corporate customers in other markets in the world to develop personal customers in China, and successfully implemented B2C business in 2012, accounting for 50% of total sales.

He Zhewei was considered to be the most daring one of all the presidents of Metro China at that time, and he opened 12 stores in a year, so far, it is an unbroken record in Metro.

Between 2012 and 2013, the downturn in the retail market affected all participants in the field. WAL-MART used a "thorough disaster" to describe the tragic sales.

Metro Group immediately announced that it would cut costs on a large scale globally and "keep fit" in the European market.

However, in 2012

Sales in China reached 1 billion 890 million euros (about 12 billion 770 million yuan), a 23% increase compared with the previous year, which made Metro Group eager to find new profit growth points to focus China on the market.

However, in order to accelerate the opening up of shops under the unfavorable growth environment, Metro China no longer "stubbornly" insists on building land management shopping malls, but continues to open stores with a cost saving lease and land purchase.

In the management system of enterprises, strictly controlling financial expenditure and increasing revenue and expenditure is the key to achieving steady business and continuous growth of performance.

Such practices also include reducing manpower expenditure and reducing pportation costs for goods procurement.

In fact, the large-scale opening of stores in China also brings pressure to Metro's capital chain to a large extent.

To speed up the opening of stores and make profits at the same time of controlling financial expenditure, he had to re analyze the business structure of Metro China.

"We focus our attention on these five businesses in order not to drag the front line too long."

He said.

The newly upgraded e-commerce platform is also rebuilt on the basis of this basic requirement.

Metro's previous practice is to invest a lot of money in building specialized warehouses for the supply of e-commerce channels, and then build a specialized logistics system, trying to make the electricity supplier become a new separate business system, from a unified e-commerce platform to the country's electricity supplier customers.

"But that kind of target customer group is concentrated on some low end customers, not the current high-end customers.

You can imagine that if we have a customer in Urumqi ordering a barrel of oil through an electricity supplier, how high is the logistics cost, "he said." this is not what we want.

Metro warehousing supermarket is a combination of supermarkets and warehouses. The success of this mode is due to the fact that the independent warehouse and distribution center of traditional retail enterprises is eliminated, and the replenishment of goods is quickly realized in the operation to ensure the low cost and efficient operation of the supermarket.

To achieve effective supply of an independent e-commerce platform, Metro must establish a professional team to operate.

Obviously, this practice will greatly waste Metro's superior resources.

On the other hand, the establishment of a specialized team also means the rise of the cost of personnel.

"In the face of fierce competition, in fact, many e-commerce companies are unable to make profits."

Xi Long believes that both ways to save costs and to a certain extent ensure profitability is to extend the development of e-commerce to the main business with the help of existing resources, and to integrate the electronic business team with the various departments within the company.

The first task of Xi Long is to find a talented person who thoroughly understands the operation of the electricity supplier to manage his team in a unified way.

He found Tao Yuan, who was responsible for the operation of electronic commerce in Chia Tai Group. After that, he carried out a large-scale personnel replacement for Metro's electricity supplier and Technology Department, but the team size was not expanded.

This is the fastest and effective way of adjusting the Department's ability to work, and it is also a measure to control the cost of personnel.

Another way is cost allocation.

The development of the entire business system is jointly developed by Metro's electricity suppliers and technical teams from different markets in the world.

"It may have required a very high development cost, but our actual development cost is surprisingly low."

Tao Yuan said.

He detailed the "low cost" development results.

It is obvious that professional customers have been paid attention to.

On the new website page, "professional customer selection" column is placed in the most prominent position.

According to Tao Yuan, this is one of the most functional areas where customers click most.

Metro's backstage job is to help these customers find a purchase plan.

"Whether it's a hotel, a dining hall or a super business, every customer's habit of browsing has a tendency.

For example, the hotel customers will browse fresh products, and Xiao Shang Chao will look at products like biscuits and milk, "he said." our job is to use the big data behind to analyze that customers can see what they may want to buy online.

Although the development path has been rugged, it has indeed accumulated resources for Metro.

The operation mode of the membership system helped Metro collect about 4000000 member information from the 1996 entry into the Chinese market.

After the completion of the electronic business platform upgrade, it can also fully open up the data link.

All product data are synchronized with offline stores, covering over 20 thousand items.

"We serve the professional customers."

Tao Yuan stressed this point more than once.

To be exact, Metro has developed new products for professional customers.

And the order of individual customers will be delivered to the three party logistics company, such as Shun Feng and home express.

If a professional customer purchases more than 5 million yuan a year in Metro, Tao Yuan also intends to set up a website for it to provide customized products.

In addition to maintaining websites and

In order to achieve full synchronization, metro also intends to provide professional customers with some useful commercial information, such as telling you the same type of customers, your competitors and peers, what they bought in the Christmas menu - based on the customer's business attributes, instead of recommending the electricity providers such as Jingdong and shop No. 1 based on their customers' income, age and gender.

In order to make the electricity supplier not like the traditional electricity supplier, and make the whole electricity business business attached to the original wholesale market system, Metro has made some concessions.

In view of shortening the logistics time and ensuring the quality of goods, the goods on the online shopping mall will be shipped directly from the offline stores.

But it also brings a question: what is the requirement for customers to use the nearest metro stores or allow them to freely choose which stores to ship? "We have done a lot of internal communication with the professional customers who have sold more goods and have dealings with each other.

After hesitating for a while, we decided to leave the right to choose which store to leave to the consumers themselves.

He can combine himself and give him more possibilities to experience.

Tao Yuan explained.